What Are The Top 10 Food Tweets?

The Lempert Report
December 15, 2016

Tweets and emojis are changing the food landscape.

Our tweets about food may be more revealing than we think, according to  research published in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance.

Researchers examined nearly 80 million public Twitter messages and picked out the 4 million that mentioned typically healthy or unhealthy foods as well as popular fast food joints. Medical Daily reported on the top ten most popular food-related tweets, only one included something healthy — chicken — while only one mentioned a chain restaurant — Starbucks. 

The study found that poorer neighborhoods were more likely to feature tweets about unhealthy foods as were larger households.  

HERE ARE THE TOP 10 FOOD TWEETS:

Coffee

Beer

Pizza

Starbucks

IPA (beer)

Wine

Chicken

BBQ

Ice cream

Taco/tacos

HUNGRY HARVEST UGLY PRODUCE EMOJI 

Concerned about food waste? Now everytime you text you can do something about it.  Hungry Harvest just released a new emoji keyboard featuring odd-looking fruits and vegetables. The characters, which don’t look like the food you’d normally see in your local supermarket, include oddities such as a two-headed carrot and a misshapen strawberry giving a thumbs-up.

Hungry Harvest hopes its Ugly Produce! app (for iOS 10.0 or later) gets people texting and talking more about these kinds of foods so that they don’t go to waste, as they too often do. According to the company, “We’ve got ‘perfect’ fruits and veggies in our keyboards, why don’t we yet have ones that have more personality, better express our feelings, and help bring awareness to some of the biggest issues of our time?”   

Hungry Harvest recovers rejected produce and, for a fee, delivers it to homes around Baltimore, D.C. and Philadelphia. For every delivery made, the company donates 1 to 2 pounds of produce through its donation partners or its free farmer’s markets for people in need. So far the group has recovered 1 million pounds of produce and donated almost 300,000 pounds.